


the avalanche of aching

by viverella



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Pining, Post-Canon, Self-Acceptance, mostly fluff tho
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 02:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11819082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: What happens if, after you become a hero, there's still a part of you that wonders if you deserve to be? What happens if, after it all, there's still a part of you that you don't like? What happens if your friends are still the best part of you? Can you really call yourself a hero?(aka in which Kimberly discovers Feelings™️ and wrestles with self acceptance and maybe falls in love a little bit on the way)





	the avalanche of aching

**Author's Note:**

> *shows up to power rangers several months late with starbucks* uhhhhhhh I would be embarrassed that in the year of our lord 2017 I'm actually writing power rangers fic, except that I've been in love with power rangers since I was like 5 years old and really, this shouldn't surprise anyone. anyway this turned out a lot thinkier than I meant and I also meant for this to be a one-shot, but my writing's felt very stale and dry lately, so I thought I'd post what I have now and pray and hope that it inspires me to finish. hope you enjoy anyways!!
> 
> (title borrowed from the below poem)

_I have this scar I can’t get rid of_  
you said on that long drive home  
I wanted to say something  
you might find comforting  
but I know how these things work  
you only make it worse when you think words  
can dispel something like this

 _and the avalanche of aching_  
_where do you put that?_  
in the palm of my hands  
I hear myself saying

_— From The Balance Between Us, by James Diaz_

  


Later, they make a tradition of it, after all the dust settles, after the Power Rangers begin to fade a little into a quirky collective dream (whispers everywhere – _Do you think they’ll ever be back? Who are they? Why did they come?_ ), after everyone in Angel Grove stops checking over their shoulders every other minute like they’re just waiting for the next alien attack. Later, the five of them return to one of the hilltops of the mine like they can’t help it, like it’s their place, like they’re actually going to be friends after all of this. Zack brings food and kindling, and Trini brings wine she steals from her mom’s secret stash, and Billy always brings various odds and ends he’s working on, and Jason laughs and jokes at him not to blow up the whole place. And Kimberly, she brings herself and her love and the heaviness in her shoulders every time as she climbs the hill and spots Zack nudging the fire to life, as she hears her friends laughing around her. She’s trying to be better these days, she thinks, but she wonders if that means anything if she’s still keeping secrets (and maybe, keeping secrets is too harsh, and maybe, she’s not actively trying to keep anything from anyone, but she thinks about the person she was before, before all of this, and she feels a heaviness in her stomach that she would die for each and every one of them and there are pieces of her that her friends still don’t know). 

“Hey,” a quiet voice breaks Kimberly’s train of thought. 

Kimberly feels something nudge her hand and when she looks up, she finds Trini pressing a plastic cup of wine into her palm. Kimberly tries for a smile she hopes looks as genuine as she means and takes a generous sip of the drink. It’s warm but smooth enough, and it lets her hide her face for just a minute so she can pretend she doesn’t internally freak out every time she’s here. 

“Thanks,” Kimberly says, squinting at the fire that’s blazing in earnest now. 

Trini hums in response and takes a sip from her own cup, quiet eyes never leaving Kimberly. There’s something heavy in her gaze like she wants to ask what’s wrong but isn’t sure it’s her place, before she looks away and just says, like she thought better of it, “Yeah.”

Zack’s dolling out skewers so they can roast things on the fire and rambling about some wild theory his mom has about where the Power Rangers came from, and Kimberly clears her throat and ventures closer to the fire, hating the unsteadiness suddenly in her feet. She thinks about all the training and fighting they’ve done together and about how those are some of the only times lately that she’s felt like she’s walking on solid ground, and she wonders if she’ll ever get that back, if she has it in her to just be. But then she’s being passed a skewer and a selection of hot dogs and veggies and marshmallows to roast on the fire, and Billy’s telling her about how he’s working a new gadget to hijack the school’s intercom system, and when she laughs and asks him why, he just shrugs and says something about how they never use it for anything useful anyways. And as Kimberly sips at her wine and munches on an odd combination of dinner and s’mores and listens to Billy explain how, theoretically, this should all work, she could almost forget that sometimes, even after everything, she still closes her eyes at night and there’s still a little bit of her that she hates. Because despite Jason’s gentle encouragement to leave it all behind, despite the unrelenting acceptance that her friends offer her like it’s not a scarce resource these days, she’s still that person who thought sharing a nude photo of someone who was supposed to be her friend was an okay thing to do. Just because she chose not to stand by while the world ended doesn’t change that. 

Next to her, Trini sighs, as if on cue. Kimberly frowns at her over her wine, raising an eyebrow in question. Trini’s quiet for a long moment, and Kimberly almost thinks that Trini’s just going to leave it at that, secretive as she often is ( _though not as secretive as me_ , Kimberly sometimes thinks, and for whatever reason the thought always leaves a dull ache in her chest). But then Trini opens her mouth to speak, her voice just loud enough to be heard over the crackle of the fire and the others’ laughter. Kimberly forgets, sometimes, how quiet people can be after spending so much time with the boys. 

“Do you ever think about it?” Trini asks, and the way she says it, the way her eyes seem to bore deep into Kimberly’s makes it seem like she’s talking to Kimberly alone, like this is some secret they’re sharing. Kimberly must look confused, because Trini continues, shifting her gaze back to the fire, “What happens to us after all of this? I mean we’re not all going to be here forever. Then what?”

Kimberly laughs then, but it’s not quite as sure as she means for it to sound. “We’re going to stay friends,” she says, “Rangers or not.”

The corner of Trini’s mouth turns up into a hint of a smile, but her eyes are no less uncertain when she says, “Are we? I have so many childhood friends who I swore up and down I’d keep in touch with, but now if you asked me what they were up to, I wouldn’t even be able to guess.”

Kimberly blinks at her, part of her trying to imagine the version of Trini who wasn’t so hesitant to make friends and the other part of her trying to ignore the gnawing suddenly at the pit of her stomach. 

“This is different,” she says, her voice firm, but the hollow feeling doesn’t leave her for the rest of the night. “I know it.”

\---

It causes quite a bit of hoopla when the Krispy Kreme announces its grand re-opening, with some of the people of Angel Grove wondering it if wouldn’t be a better idea to just seal off the whole area with something a bit more formidable, lest other aliens follow Rita’s lead and come to attack their quiet little town. But the rebuilding gets underway anyways, despite the townspeople’s best protests, and privately, Kimberly is glad, because there’s something comforting in having a little normalcy return to her life, whatever normal means these days. As Kimberly walks to Trini’s house one day so they can take a peek at all the hubbub the newly rebuilt Krispy Kreme is causing, she wonders if it’s not because this is one of those places they all shared, like the mine, like detention, that while public is theirs in a way that no one else could understand. 

When she knocks on Trini’s door, her mom answers, and Kimberly makes small talk with her, all the while thinking about what Trini said that night, about how her family is painfully normal, about how her mom and her obsessive need to present a perfect image of her family, and Kimberly thinks about her own family, about their loudness and their messiness, about their shouting and their laughter, and she wonders what’s better, to have a family dedicated to a version of itself that doesn’t exist or a family that overreacts to everything. She thinks that maybe she knows the answer. She thinks maybe she doesn’t want to know. 

“Hey,” Trini says, shrugging on a jacket and hurriedly yanking one of her signature beanies over her hair. She trots over and tugs Kimberly out the door by the arm, throwing over her shoulder, “Bye mom. We’re going out.”

And before her mom can get a word in edgewise, they’re out the door and halfway down the street, and Kimberly would protest and complain about being rude if she didn’t already know that this is, for better or worse, the most common way that Trini and her mom interact, through short sentences and mostly in passing, and it leaves Kimberly’s chest aching in a way she can’t define. 

Trini visibly relaxes as they walk further and further away from Trini’s house and towards what can be considered downtown in tiny Angel Grove. They pass lumps of concrete rubble that still have to be cleared out from the attack and roadwork that’s being done to repair the worst of the damage, and they hardly speak, and Kimberly almost feels like she should say something because she’s not used to this much silence in most of the spaces of her life, except that somehow silence with Trini never feels uncomfortable or out of place. Instead, as gravel crunches beneath Kimberly’s feet and Trini hums some tune that Kimberly doesn’t know, the two of them walking in pace with one another to the freshly rebuilt Krispy Kreme, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Part of Kimberly wants to broach the subject of Trini’s family, because Trini chafes around them in a way that Kimberly rarely sees anywhere else, but yet the other part of Kimberly wonders if this is the place, if it’s _her_ place, and anyways, Kimberly has never been great at tackling the real things head on. 

“Want to split a donut?” Kimberly offers instead, even though what she means to say is something like _are you okay_ or _you can talk to me_. 

Trini looks over at Kimberly, and there’s something almost brittle in her eyes, just for a second, before it vanishes, so quickly that Kimberly wonders if she imagined the whole thing. 

“Only if we get an old fashioned one,” Trini says, and her voice sounds a little bit like a promise of _maybe, some day._

And it’s maybe not enough, and it’s maybe not what either of them need in the long run, but it’s okay for now.

\---

Trini takes to coming over to Kimberly’s house after detention most days, and Kimberly isn’t sure if it’s just because she wants to put off facing her mom for as long as possible or if Trini genuinely wants to spend that much time around Kimberly and her crazy family, but it’s nice in a way, knowing that after all the training and the threat of the end of the world, there’s still predictability in Kimberly’s life. She doesn’t like to admit it, but part of her was worried in a way that she’s never quite vocalized that after they defeated Rita and the imminent danger was no longer there, after they no longer needed to meet at the mine every day, they’d lose a bit of who they’d become together. Sometimes, the others come as well, and Zack and Billy always leave early because they don’t want to leave their moms alone for too long, and Jason still has curfew from when he smuggled that cow into the school, but for a few hours, they sit in Kimberly’s living room or her bedroom and eat snacks and gossip about this and that thing that happened at school, and sometimes Kimberly almost forgets the friendless, hollow shell of a person she was before she met them.

Trini stays for dinner some days, ignoring the incessant buzzing of her phone as her mom tries to call her to get her home for dinner, until one day the buzzing stops, and Trini lets it slip that she finally told her mom where she goes after detention, and Trini’s mom just about died from knowing that Trini has friends who are actually normal (Kimberly laughs, privately, at this, because if Trini’s mom knew anything more about her than the fact that she used to be a cheerleader, she might have vastly different opinions about the whole situation). Trini stays for dinner some days, and they do their homework together in Kimberly’s room, a mess of books and papers and binders strewn amongst the clothes that blanket Kimberly’s floor (“You live like this?” was the first thing Trini said when she saw Kimberly’s room for the first time, but she keeps coming back anyways, so Kimberly chooses not to be too offended). 

There’s a day they’re working on a biology project together, a yearly tradition that every student has to endure before they graduate, in which they have to present on a cell organelle in a creative way, which by tradition typically means that they have to find some creative way to make a model of their organelle out of baked goods. Trini ends up staying over late, because it takes them about five tries to come up with something that vaguely resembles a mitochondria, and it takes Kimberly about twice that to get Trini to finally laugh at her terrible jokes about the powerhouse of the cell. It’s past midnight by the time they finish and there’s flour and food coloring and stray icing everywhere, but they’re left with a blob-shaped cake that’s decorated to look vaguely like a mitochondria if Kimberly squints at it and doesn’t think about it too hard, so she considers it a victory. 

“Do you think we’re losers for trying this hard on a dumb biology project?” Kimberly says, surveying the destruction they’ve wreaked on her kitchen. Her parents are going to kill her for this if they don’t clean up a little. 

Trini snorts and starts gathering up their used bakeware like she read Kimberly’s mind and puts them in the sink to rinse off. “Kim, if you think this is what made us losers, boy do I have news for you,” she says, flicking water at Kimberly. 

Kimberly laughs and grabs a stray dishcloth to start wiping down the countertops. Her eyelids feel heavy from the late hour and she’s beyond tired of thinking about anything related to school, but there’s something in her chest that feels light and almost giddy, something she can’t quite place, something she assumes is the product of exhaustion. They manage to get all the bakeware rinsed off and in the dishwasher and the countertops more or less clean of baking debris, and even though Kimberly thinks privately to herself that she should probably give the floor a thorough scrub as well (she can see little spots of flour and sugar from where they spilled ingredients), she decides to call it a day and shoos Trini out of the kitchen before Trini can take it upon herself to do more of the work.

Kimberly makes as if for the stairs and realizes perhaps a moment later that Trini’s familiar presence isn’t behind her, and when she turns around, she finds that Trini is shoving her things in her backpack like she’s getting ready to go. Something heavy suddenly sinks in Kimberly’s stomach, and she clears her throat, trying to ignore it.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

Trini looks up at Kimberly like Kimberly’s not making any sense. “Home,” she says. “We’re finishing up tomorrow, right?”

“I mean yeah, but,” Kimberly blurts out, not sure why she’s protesting and why it makes her so uncomfortable that she doesn’t quite know what the rest of her sentence is going to be. “It’s late. It’s dangerous.”

Trini snorts, and Kimberly immediately feels the weight of how ridiculous she sounds because hardly anything ever happens in Angel Grove and even on the off chance that something did happen, they’re basically superheroes, so it hardly matters. She shifts her weight and crosses her arms.

“I can take care of myself, thanks mom,” Trini says flatly, but it’s maybe less biting than Kimberly expects. 

“Just stay over,” Kimberly says before she can stop herself. “My parents will be fine with it and you can borrow some clothes – I’m sure I have stuff that fits you.”

And she’s half lying, because she’s only pretty sure her parents won’t be startled by the presence of an unannounced guest and even though she’s certain she has shirts that’ll fit Trini, all of her pants are at least four inches too long for her, but she can’t stop herself now that she’s started. She’s never been one to give up, besides. 

Trini looks at Kimberly for a long moment, as if studying her, and Kimberly finds herself holding her breath, somehow horrified that Trini will say no. Kimberly wonders if it’s because this feels like crossing a threshold, somehow, in their friendship or because Kimberly hasn’t had anyone to consider enough of a friend to have a sleepover with in too long. She supposes, in the end, that it doesn’t matter. 

The moment passes. Trini heaves a sigh but nods in agreement, making as if to follow Kimberly up the stairs to her bedroom, and Kimberly feels a huge weight lift from her chest as she leads the way up to her room. _A friend_ , she thinks to herself, _I have a real friend._

The feeling is warmer than she remembered it being.

\---

The five of them take up periodically patrolling the town after the day Rita attacks Angel Grove, and early on, all five of them go out whenever they can, before and after school, sometimes into the night, all of them jumpy and a little anxious that the universe will make good on Rita’s threat that others will come for the Zeo Crystal, but time passes and the tension hanging over the town cools off over the weeks and they all feel like they can breathe a little easier. They end up going in shifts after that, rotating in twos and threes to go out and survey the town for anything suspicious, and while their early patrols were marked by a certain sense of pressure like they’re all holding their breaths, as time passes, patrolling ends up becoming something fun and light. 

They all go patrolling with all the others at one point or another, without really meaning to or thinking about it, just going out with whoever they happen to be with at the time the instinct strikes them, and it means that most days, Kimberly and Trini end up going out on the town together, heading out as a study break between detention and getting home to do homework or sneaking out late at night together when one of them stays over at the other’s place because they lost track of time and it made more sense to just sleep over instead of going home at some ungodly hour and risk upset parents. Most nights, it’s uneventful, without much going on except for a little petty crime – someone shoplifting or teenagers breaking into closed parks late at night – and so even though Kimberly and Trini morph for good measure on the off chance that something significant will happen, they mostly sit around with their helmets off by the old mine, looking out over the town and sparring sometimes to pass the time, but mostly laughing and talking. 

Trini talks about her brothers a lot, talks about how she worries about them growing up to feel like outsiders as much as she does, about how quickly they’re growing up, and Kimberly mostly just listens, thinking about the gentle person Trini has turned out to be despite the tough exterior, thinking about how different her own family is with her, the only child. Kimberly complains about how little she can do with her hair now, having been barely capable of doing more than putting her hair up into a messy bun when her hair was long, and Trini laughs and tells her about the time that she, too, chopped off all her hair in a spontaneous act of rebellion, right around the time her parents told her they were moving for the first time. Trini offers to teach Kimberly how to do her hair and she spends the whole of one shift trying to show Kimberly how to French braid, a feat made extra difficult by the fact that they have no mirrors and they’re in their bulky combat suits and Kimberly can’t see what Trini is doing or what the final product looks like, but she laughs until her stomach hurts and there’s something soothing about Trini’s fingers combing through Kimberly’s hair to try to tame it. Kimberly feels warm and safe and happy, even though she nearly cries from laughing so hard and her cheeks are sore, and she finds herself wishing that she could find a way to bottle this feeling for those rainy days when she’s not sure of how to reassemble herself into a real person. 

“Yo!” a loud voice rings out across the otherwise empty mine. 

Kimberly whips her head around in search of the source of the noise, causing Trini to yelp and scramble frantically at the braid she’s working on in Kimberly’s hair to save it from coming undone. Kimberly laughs, making Trini smack her shoulder after tying off the braid with an extra hair tie she unearthed from somewhere, and as she looks out over the mine, she sees Zack and Billy picking their way over the rocks to them, at the ready in their combat suits, Billy carefully cradling a box of some sort in his hands. 

“Hey!” Trini calls, going to pick up her helmet from where she put it down earlier when she and Kimberly decided that nothing exciting was going to be happening tonight. 

“We brought donuts,” Billy says, hoisting the box above his head triumphantly as he gets closer to them. 

Trini grins and peeks into the box. “Do you have any with sprinkles?” she asks. 

“Of course,” Billy says, presenting the box to her to let her inspect it. “It’s not a box of donuts without sprinkles.”

Trini picks one out as Billy starts telling her about something that happened when he and his mom were at dinner, and Zack drops down to sit next to Kimberly, letting his legs dangle off of the cliff next to hers. He kicks his feet and leans back on one hand, reaching out with the other to poke at the side of Kimberly’s head. 

“Nice new look, princess,” he says, his voice light and lilting. 

Kimberly laughs and rolls her eyes, shoving Zack playfully, but she finds that beneath it all, something feels caught in her throat. She looks over at Trini, who’s laughing at something with Billy and trying not to choke on her donut, and she can’t figure out why her chest feels so tight. She wonders why she can’t seem to hang onto the light moments these days, why every minute seems to shatter in her hands the second it passes. She has friends now, real friends, and purpose, and she’s surrounded by more love than she can remember ever having in her whole life. She’s supposed to be happy, isn’t she? 

\---

Zack’s mom is the last of the parents that they meet. They all meet Billy’s mom early on, and she bakes them all cookies and laughs with them about the silly stunts that got them all in detention. She’s the first person to find the story about Kimberly punching Ty’s tooth out funny, genuinely funny, saying something about not always letting the boys call the shots, and it’s not the full truth that Kimberly tells her, but it makes her feel a little better about the whole thing anyways. Jason’s family has them all over for dinner shortly after the attack, Jason’s dad overjoyed at the people who have gotten Jason back under control, no more mindless pranks or unnecessary snark. Trini’s family is equally enthused about meeting all of them, though for different reasons, and her little brothers ramble on and on about the Power Rangers the entire time they’re there. Zack and Trini keep trying to convince the little boys that their ranger is the best, making the rest of them laugh as the two of them practically give away their identities to Trini’s oblivious brothers in their attempts to persuade them. Kimberly is mildly nervous the first time everyone comes over to her house after detention, but her mom always smiles and offers them snacks and her dad invites everyone to stay for dinner when he gets home from work and sees five teenagers sprawled out in his living room, and really, it’s all better than expected, considering how much they flipped out at her when they first found out she’d gotten detention and the fact that she met all of her closest friends thanks to that sentence. 

Zack’s mom is last, and when he finally invites them over, Kimberly can see a note of hesitation she’s never really seen in him before, this fear that only began to let itself be known at that one bonfire they had at the mine, all those weeks ago, when he let it slip that she’s sick. He brings them over one day after detention, and he presents them the mobile home park with a flourish, no shame or fear in his eyes until he approaches the door to his home and nudges it open, calling out to his mom in what Kimberly assumes is Mandarin, remembering from somewhere in the back of her mind a story about how Mandarin was Zack’s first language, which made going to English speaking schools as a five-year-old quite a shock. Kimberly wonders what that kind of fear is like, to know that the only family you have is only here on borrowed time, and knows she will never quite understand the heavy feeling that must be. 

The first time they meet her, she tries to speak to them in English as much as she can, accented and broken as her English is, and Kimberly thinks of her own mother, of her accented English that she struggled through for years to fit into this new country. At some point, they find that the easiest way to do it is for them to talk through Zack, for him to translate for all of them, and things start going a lot smoother after that. They learn that she’s originally from Shanghai, and that she moved here with Zack when he was young so she could get treatment for her condition. They learn that summer at home for her means long, lazy, humid days so unlike the brief spells of dry heat they get in Angel Grove, and that she used to dream of being a musician when she was a little girl. 

Zack’s mom has long, beautiful hair, and there’s one day when it’s just Zack and Kimberly and Trini, Billy and Jason off on another one of Billy’s foraging adventures, and Trini offers to braid it for her after she compliments Trini on her hair, and they spend an afternoon watching Trini make quick work of Zack’s mom’s long hair, gathering up the strands with practiced fingers. Kimberly can’t help staring at the look of concentration on Trini’s face, the slight furrow in her eyebrows and the way she bites her lip just a little as she twists the hair into place, and she wonders why she feels almost unsettled inside, like she can feel the phantom after-images of Trini’s fingers running through her own hair. 

“There,” Trini says, having produced a few extra hair ties from somewhere to hold it all in place. She smiles at Zack’s mom, and Kimberly is struck suddenly by how soft Trini is, by how much love Trini keeps trapped inside of her, despite the image she tries to cultivate and the heavy metal music and the pout she’s perfected to a T. “You look twenty-nine again.”

Zack murmurs the translation, and his mom gives Trini a smile that’s two parts touched and one part maybe a little sad, somehow. She places a hand on Zack’s arm and says something quietly in Mandarin, and the look on his face almost breaks Kimberly’s heart. 

“Mom,” he says, his voice wobbling like he could cry. 

“Zack,” she says back, her voice firm, like they’ve had this conversation a million times before. 

Trini looks back and forth between them, her expression careful and guarded, like she’s afraid she’s done something wrong or overstepped somehow. “Zack?” she ventures quietly. 

Zack blinks a few times and clears his throat. Kimberly is reminded all of a sudden of the quiet moments that Zack and Trini often share, always off to the side, always in the background, an unspoken closeness between them that materialized one day without anyone noticing, and she wonders what they talk about when the others aren’t there, something tight in her chest. 

“She said,” Zack says, softly, like if he speaks any louder he’ll break altogether, “She said she’s glad that when she’s gone, I’ll have friends like you looking out for me.”

Trini lets out a small yelp that might’ve been a sob if she hadn’t clapped a hand over her mouth, and her eyes are wide and watery. Zack’s mom turns to cradle Trini’s face in her hands and she smiles, warm and comforting and not at all like she’s had the terrifying truth of her future hanging over her for most of her adult life. It’s what a mother should look like, Kimberly finds herself thinking, and wonders when the last time Trini had a moment like that with her own mother was, and aches. 

“My son is happy,” Zack’s mom says, and it sounds like she means it like a salve. “This is all I want.”

Trini’s face breaks open into a smile that’s somewhere between warmed, maybe, by the thought that anyone thinks that of her, and saddened by the context. Trini starts crying, and Zack’s mom starts crying, and Zack, too, starts crying, and Kimberly is left wondering when she became the odd man out and then immediately feels horrible for even thinking that. She watches them and tries to be happy or sad or whatever the emotion is that the rest of them are feeling and she wonders to herself if she’s a better person than she was, all those months ago before she met these people who have become her entire life now. She wonders if she’s better, if trying and wishing and wanting to be like Jason keeps telling her is enough. She wonders what it means that she feels in that moment, instead of something purer like love or compassion or empathy, is something ugly and bitter like jealousy, maybe, or envy. Maybe this is just the person she is now, she thinks, and hopes that it’s not true. Hopes that hoping is enough to redeem her.

**Author's Note:**

> comments/kudos are very very appreciated!!
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](http://chirrutimwae.tumblr.com) if you like!


End file.
